Rob Doyle - Here Are the Young Men

It was a horrible sound even to Kearney, who had now turned and was walking hastily up the remaining pair of steps, out through the black, leaf-shrouded gate. He heard a shout from behind as he came on to Parnell Square and fled into the city with his head down, hands in his pockets, turning here, turning there, losing himself, getting the hell away, heart pounding like some mad fucking thing.

Late on Saturday morning, the Tooley doorbell rang. Rez’s mother went to get it.

Rez was watching television: he was watching The Weakest Link . Not fully lucid because of the drugs, Rez wondered if he were the Weakest Link. Was that what she was saying, the stern-looking woman on-screen? If he were the Weakest Link, it would probably be better to not be here at all.

Cocker stepped into the room, smiling shyly, cheeks rosy — maybe Cocker was the Weakest Link. Jen followed behind him. Rez’s mother peeked in anxiously, over their heads, then left them to it.

‘Alright,’ said Rez, already exhausted by the affair.

‘Alright Rez,’ they said. Jen sat on the armchair and Cocker sat on the smaller couch. Everyone faced the television. For a while no one spoke, all watching The Weakest Link .

Then Rez turned to Cocker. ‘You are … the Weakest Link?’ he said. No one responded. Jen coughed and looked at the carpet.

Eventually, Cocker cleared his throat and said, ‘So how are ye doin, Rez?’

‘Great, Cocker,’ Rez replied. Cocker nodded vigorously, relieved at this response; it made things easier for him. Rez reasoned that he was smarter than Cocker; therefore he, Rez, probably was not the Weakest Link.

Conversation spluttered on for a while, not taking off, not going anywhere. Jen tried to talk about books.

‘I’m reading this great one,’ she said. ‘By Albert Camus. The Fall , it’s called. It keeps reminding me of you.’

She had pronounced the author’s first name like the English version, and the surname as Cam-Uss. Rez’s awareness of these errors provoked searing mental pain. ‘What’s it about?’ he muttered. Then he lapsed into staring at the screen. Friendship, he mused, was something you probably had in the nineteenth century, for example.

A few minutes later Jen quietly said, ‘I’m goin away soon, Rez.’

He turned to her. ‘Are you?’ She nodded. ‘How soon? What about college? The exam results will be out in …’

‘Around three weeks’ time,’ said Cocker.

Jen said, ‘Yeah I know, but I’m goin to go away even if I get into college. You can take a year out, sometimes even two years. But you never know: if I really like it over there, I mightn’t even come back. Things here are … it’s not the same.’

Rez considered this. Everyone was drifting apart. ‘Where are ye goin?’ he asked.

‘India. I fly to Mumbai this day two weeks.’

‘So soon,’ said Rez. Something was coming to an end; something was breaking that could never be fixed again. ‘Who are ye goin with?’

Jen gave a sad, quiet laugh. ‘No one,’ she said.

What about Matthew, Rez wondered. But then the news came on RTÉ. Cocker and Jen turned to watch the headlines. For once, the main story wasn’t about the Iraq invasion: it was about something foul that had taken place the day before in the Garden of Remembrance. A camera conveyed from the middle distance the grim-faced forensic squad, the police tape, the sky of solemn grey that seemed to acknowledge the gravity of what had been perpetrated beneath it. Gardaí, said the newsreader, wanted for questioning a young male who had been spotted at the scene, wearing a black leather jacket and black woolly hat.

‘Jesus,’ said Cocker.

‘Oh God,’ said Jen.

Rez was gazing at the screen, transfixed not by the atrocity it depicted but by his own pristine indifference. He closed his eyes and craved relief from his thoughts, craved medication, craved being left alone — and right at that very instant, the fogged landscape of his mind lit up in a flash of intense lucidity. Rez was seized by a powerful certainty: he saw it all; the sneer, the surge of reckless malevolence, the gleeful fascination — this was the madness that Matthew had been talking about.

‘Jesus,’ he rasped. The others assumed he was shocked by the news report and didn’t respond. Together they gazed at the screen. Already Rez was doubting himself. Could it really be true? Maybe it was just the drugs tampering with his reality filter, or maybe he was going mad. He knew his logical capacity had fallen into turmoil. He really needed to think this through …

Just then, Rez’s mother stuck her head in the door. She smiled wanly at Jen and Cocker; then she scrutinized Rez with her anxious gaze and said, ‘It’s time for your medicine, love.’

On Saturday afternoon it was screaming from the front pages of all the papers on sale at the garage. I stared at the headlines and photos without picking up a paper. I got back to work and talked to no one, and when I was standing out on the forecourt I put my headphones in and played the music at maximum volume.

By the time I got home that night, it was as if the only subject of conversation in Dublin was the killing of James Appleton, or ‘Baby James’ as they were already calling him. Two German tourists had seen it happen in the Garden of Remembrance. Everywhere you looked — in the papers, on telly, the radio, the net — his round, calm, unjudging face peered out at you. I heard the name repeated over and over: James Appleton, James Appleton, James Appleton . That was when the headaches started.

The next day at work, I read The Sunday Independent . In the front-page article it said that the ‘sickening, barbaric and incomprehensible’ killing of ‘Baby James’ was ‘a symbol of the nation’s ravaged innocence, and if James’ death goes unpunished, the sin will stain all our souls’. By now I was having to take two Paracetamol every couple of hours to dull the glare of pain in the top half of my skull.

On Monday I tried to just get on with things. For the past week I’d taken to secretly drinking vodka in my room. I was drunk that evening as I watched the news, with my untouched dinner on a tray across my lap. My ma was in the room too. That was when the interview was shown — the one that became so famous. My ma was in tears as we sat together before the screen. James Appleton’s mother looked straight into the camera, her face all gnarled in agony and madness. She just kept saying, ‘How could you do it? How could you do it? How could you?’

Tuesday’s editorial in The Irish Times described it as ‘a shocking, traumatic interview which gave a terrible eloquence to our nation’s corrupted soul, to the ravages of the moral plague that has assailed us, and to our collective horror and incomprehension in the face of it’.

The headaches went on all week. I drank in my room, starting each afternoon, with my computer on and music playing, washing down painkillers with vodka or wine. But there were moments that burned through, and I was fully aware.

I woke up with dull light filtering into the room through the pale-blue curtains. I heard a dog bark in the distance, and even further away the music from an ice-cream van, so faint I wasn’t even sure it was real. A sad, beautiful feeling came over me, like I was a child again and everything was familiar and okay. There were no thoughts in my head. I lay there for maybe a minute, not worried about anything. Then I tilted my head a fraction and it all came back: the grinding in my skull, the parched mouth, the feeling like maggots squirming under my skin.

I lifted my head to look beside the bed. There was vodka left in the bottle, and a glass with some flat 7Up in the bottom. I poured the rest of the vodka into the glass. I drank it standing with my hand resting on the windowsill, washing down two Paracetamol. Then I phoned in sick.